Morris missed the boat

In his August 26 letter to the editor, "Socialists in our midst," Jim Morris cites his leading objection to Where We Stand, Voices of Southern Dissent as being the fact that "It's an open attack on the current President." It's my understanding that the US is still a democracy and not a totalitarian state. In a democracy, it is not only every citizen's right to express his/her views, but, in essence, a duty as well. Therefore, Morris's statement can be viewed as a description of the book but is irrelevant as a point of criticism.

Morris refers to one of the contributors to the book as "one of our history professors from UVA." I trust this doesn't mean that Morris is majoring in history at UVA, as he seems quite unaware that the moving force behind the UN was the then President of the United States, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and that the UN structure and Charter were established at a conference in San Francisco.

He also conveniently overlooks that in the past 100 years, the US has (using words from his letter) "given demonstration to the world of the following": segregation, the Ku Klux Klan, the early 20th-century disenfranchisement of black voters via "Redemption," McCarthyism, the Cold War support for dictators around the globe, etc.

Every part of the world has events and policies that it has little reason to be proud of. Chanting lists of these is neither debate nor insight.